Statistics Canada says the economy saw its largest monthly drop on record in April as it came to a near standstill due to the pandemic, but early indications point to a rebound in May as businesses began to reopen. The agency said Tuesday gross domestic product fell 11.6 per cent in April with non-essential businesses […]
The International Monetary Fund has sharply lowered its forecast for global growth this year because it envisions far more severe economic damage from the coronavirus than it did just two months ago. The IMF predicts that the global economy will shrink 4.9 per cent this year, significantly worse than the three per cent drop it […]
The economy appears to have avoided a worst-case scenario due to the coronavirus pandemic, the Bank of Canada said Wednesday as it kept its key interest rate steady at its lower bound. The bank left its target for the overnight rate unchanged at 0.25 per cent, which it has said is as low as it […]
Canada’s economy had its worst quarterly showing since 2009 through the first three months of 2020 owing to the novel coronavirus, Statistics Canada said Friday, warning an even steeper drop may be coming. Gross domestic product fell at an annualized rate of 8.2 per cent in the first quarter, including a 7.2-per-cent drop in March […]
Devastated by the coronavirus, the U.S. economy is sinking. And the plunge is accelerating. Now, as some businesses in a few states start to trickle back to work, hopes are beginning to arise that the economy, damaged as it is, might be poised to rebound by the second half of the year. If more employees […]
Investors and economists around the world are drastically changing their forecasts as the world enters another week of disruption from the spread of the coronavirus. Indeed, Scotiabank’s updated economic forecast suggests recession is inevitable in many countries, with global growth expected to average 1.3 per cent in 2020, the lowest level since the decline of […]
Low interest rates and reduced trade tensions will likely buoy the global economy over the next two years and help nurture steady if modest growth. That’s the view of the International Monetary Fund, which foresees world economic growth accelerating from 2.9 per cent last year to 3.3 per cent in 2020 and 3.4 per cent […]
Japanification is a term describing the spread of low growth and low inflation around the world. Speaking at the Canadian Investment Review’s 2019 Defined Benefit Investment Forum in Toronto on Dec. 6, Charles Lannon, head of equities at Cidel Asset Management Inc., discussed whether Europe and the United States are destined for a similar fate […]
China’s debt problem is serious, but the risk of a hard landing or banking crisis is, in my view, low. The reason is that the potential bad debts are corporate, not household, debts and were made at the direction of the state—by state-controlled banks to state-owned enterprises, as part of a stimulus in response to […]
Global growth slowed to three per cent on an annual basis in the middle of 2019 and is expected to remain below three per cent for the next 18 months, according to a Q4 report by Aviva Investors. “That would represent the weakest sustained period for over a decade,” the report said. “We expect all […]